nathalie shushan

The break up was brutal. We argued in Porto and left the relationship on unstable ground. I wept, tears stained his shirt, as we hugged goodbye while the taxi waited to take me to the airport. I was going to Morocco to meet my mother for the holiday.

The flight was an hour and a half but time expanded to hold my sadness. My inhales were sharp and suffocating, like air couldn’t reach my lungs despite my best effort. I watched the earth change from land to endless sea beneath me. With nothing to distract me from my sadness, I replayed the events of the night before, formulated my apology, decided resolutely against telling my mom in case it didn’t stick or maybe so she wouldn’t have the satisfaction of knowing my heart’s been broken. As we finally moved weightlessly over Morocco, I watched the clouds cast their shadows on the earth and my grief shifted into the background with the hum of the plane for a brief moment.

I met my mom at the exit of the airport in Agadir. She eagerly hugged me hello and I lasted twelve seconds before pouring my sadness into her arms, face still streaked red from tears on the plane. She held onto it for me there, surrounded by people shifting to find their way, until I was ready to move again. She whispered her sympathy as I steadied my breath and we made our way toward the nearest taxi with all of our belongings.

I moved through the day in a haze, constantly tapping my phone screen to see if I’d missed any signs of life. I sat silent and watched the waves crash onto the shore in the distance. No sound penetrated my fog. My mom ate hungrily by the afternoon while I watched. The day passed around me at an excruciatingly slow pace. I returned to our hotel room before the sun fell beneath the horizon and, still not having heard anything from him, crawled under the thin covers of a new bed.

I woke up suddenly at 9:56 PM and reached for my phone with my eyes still closed. I squinted them open and saw a block of text that had been sent only minutes before. The pain registered before the words did. “Our relationship is over,” he began, “and this is the last piece of communication you’ll ever receive from me.” I screamed.

My whimpers turned into wails. “No, no, no, no, no” I moaned. My mom sat up startled from her slumber. My vision went dark and I writhed in pain, my limbs threatening to separate from my body. My hands curled into fists, knuckles white, nails digging into the heels of my palms. After begging to deepen the connection between my mind and my body, worried I wasn’t sensitive enough, I was delivered this emotional blow that registered viscerally through my entire being. 

I cried in my mom’s arms. I called my friends, called my sisters, circulated the anger-filled paragraphs around, mumbled sentences as I read them aloud. I passed the long night awake and finally felt my eyelids grow heavy when I noticed rays of light peak through the curtains.

I awoke shortly after with a dull ache in my chest, like the memory of pain that had lodged itself in my heart long ago. It gradually became more intense until I felt like I’d be crushed from the weight of it if I stayed lying down. I felt hollow, like all the good parts of me were carved out and no longer welcome inside of me.

“Can we go to a hammam?” I whimpered to my mom, eyes dry of tears but voice creaky like a loose floorboard. My mom, who characteristically believes self-care to be indulgent, willingly obliged. We peaked out of our door to ask the hotel manager for a recommendation. He kindly suggested the local public hamam and arranged for a taxi to pick us up while we prepared a change of clothes to take with us.

When we arrived, my mom’s excitement deflated while I, in stark contrast, felt relief wash over me like a wave. The front room was empty, white tiles yellowed with age. A woman walked out from a back room and began speaking in Arabic. We communicated in different languages, pointing and pantomiming, until we found our way to a corridor lined with lockers that opened into room with foggy windows and four granite tables. We were handed robes and the woman mimed removing her clothes.

With no privacy, my mom suddenly became visibly self-conscious. She had always been freely naked around the house, walking around in towels long after having bathed. I assumed that she wouldn’t have any problems with the nudity I knew would be expected of us, much less the brief moment between being fully clothed and finding shelter in our robes. Still, she courageously shed her clothes as she expressed her discomfort, remaining as open to the experience as she could.

We were led into a small room, built like a sauna, with tiled steps on which to sit or lay, and handed a small bucket of malleable black soap and a big bucket of water. “Wash,” the woman commanded before she left us. Naked, we took seats across from two women. My mom and I looked quizzically at each other and discreetly followed their example as they cupped the soap in their hands before massaging it along their arms and shoulders.

We made shallow conversation while we washed. I focused on the task at hand with a diligence I hadn’t implemented in a long time. I moved slowly, my soapy fingers sliding across the contours of my arms, along my bones, over my breasts. I curled to reach my ankles, my feet, between my toes. I left no part of myself untouched. Mimicking the woman across from me, I rinsed myself with the bucket of warm water when I felt finished and hung my head in silence.

Shortly after, two women came to gather us. They poured the remainder of the water buckets onto our bodies. My masseuse guided me by hand until we reached the table at the far corner of the room. When I climbed onto it and laid on my back, she held her palm up and flipped it over to show me to lie on my stomach instead. I did as I was told, cheek to table, granite cold. Beads of warm water dripped over goosebumps that studded my skin.

The woman was firm with her grip as she pulled me closer to the edge of the table. She slipped the coarse mitt onto her hand and began to scrub my skin raw with steady pressure, moving back and forth in sections, methodical and thorough. Tears streamed silently down onto the table, mingling with the warm water like a river flowing into an ocean. The masseuse made no indication that she noticed me crying. She continued silently until she flipped her hand back over in my line of sight to tell me it was time to lay on my back. She extended each arm while she scrubbed the other side, same with each leg, then my stomach, then my chest. I looked vacantly up at the ceiling, unable to smile and grateful that my nudity felt like a cloak of invisibility out of both respect and indifference.

I stayed motionless after the scrubbing stopped. The masseuse left and returned with a bucket full of steaming hot water, tapping the center edge of the table. I swung my legs over, limp, sitting with my shoulders slumped. The masseuse used the bucket to throw water over my head and massaged shampoo into my hair with new tenderness. I turned my face down, watched the water drip from the ends of my hair and followed them to the ground. With another swift toss of water, she rinsed my hair. She threw the last of it onto my body for good measure and nodded to indicate that we were done.

Without a towel, I hugged myself as I walked naked back toward the locker room. This time without soap, I glided my fingertips gently over my skin as it dried in the warm air. I felt new. In spite of not having been looked at, or maybe because of it, the woman at the hamam tended to me in a profound way. The harsh fatigue from my sleepless night was transformed into the quiet need for rest that sets in after an extreme release of tension. I sighed as I dressed in fresh clothes, finally able to breathe a little deeper.